Office: ECH 1214
Department of Fine Arts
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3G1
Tel.: 519.888.4567, ext. 42671
Email: joan.coutu@uwaterloo.ca
Joan Coutu’s research concentrates on the built environment at the bookends of the British Empire: in eighteenth-century Britain and its colonies, and in Canada in the early Commonwealth era. Her focus is on monuments, buildings, sculpture, and park design, and their relationship with politics, time, and identity. She has published extensively on eighteenth-century British visual culture, notably Then and Now: Collecting and Classicism in Eighteenth-century England (2015) and Persuasion and Propaganda: Monuments and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2006), and co-edited (with Jon Stobart and Peter Lindfield), Politics and the English Country House, 1688-1800 (2023), all published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. She is currently editing (with David Galbraith), Utopia and Hubris: Classicism in Canada, c. 1900-1950. For essays and articles, please see her cv.
Joan teaches Visual Culture and Art History courses in Fine Arts and is the former co-ordinator of the interdisciplinary program in Visual Culture (1996-2022), based in Fine Arts. She also organizes and teaches several course trips – to Rome, Venice, England, Berlin, etc. - and is actively involved in the MFA program as a co-supervisor.
Originally from Toronto, Joan graduated with a B.A. from the University of Toronto, a M.A. from Queen’s University, Kingston, and a PhD from University College, London (England), all in the History of Art. She joined the Department of Fine Arts in 1996.